Chucky Season 3 (Part 2) Review: Chucky's Wilder Than Ever and That's a Very Good Thing
In the new episodes, Brad Dourif reminds us he's a legend for a reason, as the White House shows just how haunted it is.
I’ll never stop marveling at what a unicorn the Chucky franchise is. 36 years after Child’s Play hit theaters, the story has continued with the same creator and writer, Don Mancini, essentially driving it the entire time, maintaining the same continuity, and using many of the same characters and actors, without ever being given a true reboot. (No, MGM doing that 2019 remake of the original, the only movie they own, doesn’t count, since it was done both simultaneously to and in opposition to the ongoing franchise.) This just doesn’t happen, especially not with horror.
And yet here we are, with Chucky, the TV series, returning for the second half of Season 3 Wednesday night – its split necessitated by the two big Hollywood strikes last year delaying production – as the story of Charles Lee Ray (Brad Dourif), Tiffany Valentine (Jennifer Tilly), and those in their orbit continues to evolve and go to places no one could imagine. Like, say, the White House.
The first half of Season 3 established the how and why Chucky ended up as an occupant of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue – an address that changes all the rules – continuing his murder spree, even as a government agent, Warren Pryce (Gil Bellows) helped cover up those crimes to protect the truth from coming out, assisted by the First Lady (Lara Jean Chorostecki). Those first four episodes also revealed that the usually-durable Chucky was really and truly dying, as his body began to wither and look old and decrepit, having been forsaken by Damballa, the voodoo spirit who allowed him to live on as a doll all these years.
Is the paragraph I typed above insane? Yeah, pretty much. And so is Chucky. And boy, am I thankful for that.
I get that Chucky, as a series, can probably be, well, too much for a certain sect of fans who want the franchise to feel more similar to how it began, in terms of its darker and more grounded tone - well, as grounded as a killer doll movie can be. But I also think that’s not being practical. Because there was just no way for Chucky to continue on this long and not go big… and then bigger… and finally waaaaaay bigger. Because Chucky himself demanded it.
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